The Dawn of Liberty: The French Revolution and the First Republic

The Constitution of 1790

The new Assembly decided to meet in the Tuileries Palace, where they had been meeting since the women of Paris had compelled them to move from Versailles to the capital the previous October. They quickly renamed the Tuileries to the Palais de la République as their first action, with only token resistance from the few monarchien conservatives still remaining. They had been a major force in the Assembly through much of 1789 but now their influence had vanished entirely.

There were several matters upon which the Assembly was of virtually a single mind, and it took less than a week for most of these to come to a conclusion. Lafayette’s proposal for the basic structure of the Republic, that of a centralized government in which the President would be popularly elected but could only come from the ranks of the unicameral Assembly, received near-unanimous assent, largely based as it was on the successful American model. The provinces would be organised along the departmental lines outlined the previous year, with each department being run by a local assembly whose elections would be simultaneous with those of the National Assembly and the President. As a concession to the radicals, especially those from the Cordeliers Club, Lafayette largely neutered the office of the Mayor of Paris, instead empowering the Paris Commune — much to the surprise and displeasure of the current mayor, Jean Sylvain Bailly, who had been lobbying Lafayette to smash the radical sections and give him untrammeled power over the city. The rest of the details, however, would take much longer to work out, with questions over slavery, the status of the Catholic Church, the governance of colonies, and the political status of women taking months at a time to work out.

It would only be in 1793 that the complete Constitution of the Republic was finalized, one of the final acts of the Second Assembly. Much of the urgency had been defused by the successful passage in the initial fortnight of sittings of a collection of decrees known — together with the early decrees on the basic structure of the government — as the Constitution of 1790. Explicitly modeled on the American Bill of Rights, these decrees were special laws that superseded all other law and could only be suspended by secret ballot of the Assembly with at most two dissenters. Their main purpose translates those rights found in the Declarations of the Rights of Man into written law, although now largely purged of the “active vs passive citizen” distinction that had so animated the Assembly during the Revolution’s first year, and formed a rock-solid foundation for civil liberties in the new Republic [1].

Along with the string of military victories in Gascony through late February and early March, when the former American President Kim visited Paris to massive public interest and adulation in late March Lafayette could reasonably tell him that France was on the right path. Kim’s visit, although known only to Lafayette and the American government at the time, came with another boon to the new Republic: two tons of gold and silver, the first tranche of an enormous amount of hard currency — at least $20 million worth — personally gifted to the First Republic by Kim (and, later, the American government) through the 1790s. The gift was happily accepted and soon put to work paying back some of France’s increasingly anxious creditors, many of whom were thus subsequently well-inclined to back the Republic in the Civil and Coalition Wars to come. They may not have been overly impressed by impassioned speeches extolling democracy and liberty, but the bankers of Paris, Amsterdam and London were positively ecstatic about the Republic’s ability to pay off its debts in a timely manner. This would have an easy-to-miss but objectively enormous impact on the fortunes of the Republic in the years ahead.

The birth of the parties

On matters not directly related to the imposition of the core Constitution of 1790, however, divisions soon emerged as the question over how the new Constitution was to be implemented drew different answers from different sections of the Assembly. The bulk of the deputies were uncommitted and belonged to no faction at all, and were generally described by the somewhat derogatory aphorism “La Plaine” (The Plain) — or, even more derogatory, “Les Crapauds des Marais” (The Toads of the Marsh). Two distinct camps began to coalesce around the dominant personalities of the Assembly to vie for the support of the Plain, upon whom any majority in the Assembly depended — as well as any majority in the Jacobin Club, from which both groups hailed.

The larger of the two was the Jacobin moderates and those few monarchien leftovers who had chosen to accept the Republic. These soon turned into a loose grouping around Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Marie Roland — although in the latter case, it was his wife, Madame Marie-Jeanne Roland, who held the true political power in the relationship. Indeed, Madame Roland was soon widely acknowledged as the unofficial leader of the faction through her ownership of the salon where these deputies and like-minded publicans typically met most nights to discuss policy and strategy. Officially this group called themselves the Society of 1789, but as many of the most prominent deputies originally hailed from in and around the Bordeaux region, this grouping quickly became known as the Gironde. They came to occupy the right-hand side of the meeting chamber.

Opposite them on the left side of the chamber were the radicals in both the Assembly and the Jacobin Club; those who had railed against the “active vs passive citizen” distinction throughout 1789, those who had called for a mass uprising against Versailles throughout the previous October and November, and those who called for the most radical social and political reforms to French society. Of these, Robespierre and Danton were unquestionably the dominant personalities, and meetings of the Jacobin Club were often used to coordinate political strategy and decide on policy stances (although at this stage, the Paris Jacobin Club was ironically controlled by none other than Brissot’s Girondins). A minority from the beginning that often stood in opposition to the wishes of the majority, this group soon came to be called the Mountain — “La Montagne”. So began the political history of a word now universally associated with radical, revolutionary politics.

There were two major points of division that soon emerged between the Gironde and the Mountain. The first was whether the Revolution had finished its work or not. For the Gironde, the set of political rights now enshrined in the Constitution of 1790 was by and largely sufficient, and the important political task now was reconstituting the legal system — which, after all, needed rebuilding from the ground up, having been completely torn down as one of the earliest acts of the first Assembly — to enforce the new order. In this, they were heavily inspired by the experience of the United States and wished to model the French Constitution on the American. Brissot, Condorcet, and the other leading figures in the Gironde supported some further additions and reforms to the Constitution of 1790 in certain areas, but otherwise, the Gironde was the new home of social traditionalism in the National Assembly.

While the early Gironde is often described as the first of the parties (along with the Mountain), in truth they were much too disunited on key issues to be truly described as such. The main which revealed just how loosely knit the early Girondins was the question of slavery in the colonies. Many of the leaders of the Gironde were passionate abolitionists, Brissot having lived in America with its abolitionist Constitution as recently as 1788 and having founded the “Society of the Friends of the Blacks” upon his return to France. But the loose faction Brissot and Condorcet led, as well as the Plain upon whose political power they relied, was dominated by well-to-do liberal nobles, merchants, and other bourgeoisie. Many of these men were heavily invested in the sugar, coffee and indigo trade, and made a handsome profit from their "investments" (i.e. slave estates) on Saint-Domingue. And so, by and large, the Gironde was reticent to follow the American lead on the question of slavery in 1790, settling instead for full Republican citizenship for the free people of color on Saint-Domingue (many of whom were themselves wealthy slaveowners) and a token strengthening of the Code Noir.

The same applied to the question of gender quality, although in 1790 this issue raised far fewer passions than that of slavery. In keeping with their broad social traditionalism, the Gironde by and large as opposed to the equalization of rights between the sexes at this early stage in the life of the Republic. Madame Roland was particularly strident in this regard and was often described as "Madame Hypocrite" by Danton and Desmoulins as a result [2]. When women began to appear in National Guard units and even participate in actual fighting near the end of 1790, this was seen by Girondins as an aberration borne out of desperation due to a lack of available recruits, not an example of things to come. It would take until the Battle of Lyon the following year for this reflexive traditionalism to be seriously challenged.

On the whole, the Gironde thus argued that the Revolution needed protection, not advancement, and they were more focussed on military needs than social or political ones. On this, the Mountain fiercely disagreed. How could slavery be permitted in the Republic when Article I of the Constitution of 1790 said, in no uncertain terms, that "men are born free and equal"? How could the Revolution be regarded as complete, Danton and Robespierre argued, whilst bread and sugar were in short supply in the streets of the capital? How could a government be truly democratic whilst the decisions of government were not in themselves subject to the final assent of the people? How could Madame Roland argue that the people were freed, and there were no more “passive citizens”, whilst she herself opposed the emancipation of half the population, of her own sex? Why, when the finances of the nation were still decidedly shaky, were the parasitic monasteries and other freeloaders in the Catholic Church allowed to independently hold vast lands and monies that were rightly the property of the nation as a whole? These and more were the questions that would come to define French politics for generations to come.

The Jacobin Schism

However, none of these questions, while sources of passionate debate, were what drove the Gironde and the Mountain apart and led the Jacobin Club to split in two. That, instead, was the question of late 1790 of how to conduct the war and, above all, whether to expand it, as the great Republican push to the south fizzled out and French Civil War began to turn ever more against the Republic. It was this question that drove Brissot and Robespierre, previously allies and fellow leaders of the Jacobin Club, to become bitter enemies, with tragic consequences for the latter. Brissot argued that the war was aimed at the wrong enemy; in extraordinary, somewhat paranoid speeches on the floor of both the Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he argued that the true enemy was not King Louis — it was Austria.

Austria, that was supplying Louis with arms and mercenaries. Austria, that had sheltered the emigres throughout 1789, and used them to build a counterrevolutionary army now unleashed on the French people. Austria, that was biding its time until the Republic faltered, upon which it would strike and purge all of France like “they” had purged Marseille. It was thus Austria against whom France needed to strike, lest Austria strikes them first. Moreover, a war with the true enemy would surely galvanise the people, stir them into even greater action, and give them the extra morale boost required for them to drive Louis from France once and for all.

To Robespierre, this was complete madness. Calling into question the wildly optimistic forecasts Brissot made of the outcome of such a war, he and the other Montagnards pointed out that the Republican Army and National Guard were losing in the field to just the Royalist armies, and at best was maintaining a stalemate. If war were declared on Austria, then Prussia, Spain, and perhaps even Britain would intervene; how could France possibly hope to succeed against all of Europe combined? Furthermore, far from exposing all of France’s hidden internal enemies to be rooted out, such a dramatic escalation of war would likely create even more internal enemies. For all Brissot warned of the dangers of radical change, Robespierre noted with more than a hint of irony, he was proposing the most radical scheme of all: war with all of Europe.

Brissot, for his part, was disgusted by what he saw as timidity on the part of Robespierre and the rest of the Mountain. They had proposed extraordinary schemes for the radical overhaul of the entire French social and political structure over the year: state-funded universal education, a mandatory cap on the price of bread, mass confiscation of Church property, the list went on. But yet when it came to this matter, Robespierre was now a fount of caution? Brissot could barely believe his ears as he listened to Robespierre’s dispassionate oratory on the matter, and it was no shock when, fatefully, on the 12th of October, he and the other Girondins walked out of the Robespierre-led Jacobin Club, never to return. The split between the Mountain and the Gironde was complete.

Lafayette’s intervention

Brissot’s confidence was based in no small part on his knowledge that he had the support of the vast majority of the Plain, and thus the Assembly as a whole. Austrophobia had been deeply ingrained for generations in the French psyche, made only worse by the fact that the deeply unpopular Queen was the brother of the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna. Moreover, Robespierre’s arguments, convincing as they were to the Mountain, held little sway amongst the bulk of uncommitted deputies; many thought that he should not have been permitted to take his seat in the Assembly in the first place, and many felt that Lafayette’s regular warnings about letting would-be tyrants and terrorists gain power over the people was aimed at the Mountain (as his diaries would later bear out). Besides, Austria really was funding Louis and was providing them with mercenary armies; in the eyes of most, the two nations were effectively at war anyway. Better to either force Austria to end their support or make the undeclared war a declared one. It seemed that an ultimatum to Austria that would set the two nations on the path to war was inevitable, but then in stepped the one voice who single-handedly could overrule all others in commanding the attention of the Assembly: Lafayette.

He had held his peace for weeks and chosen not to participate directly in the debate, concerning himself with the more pressing tasks of the day-to-day conduct of the war, building up the administration of the new Republic, and retaining the support of the provinces — particularly the Vendée — who were tiring of endless recruitment drives to replace constant battlefield losses, as well as those who had never been the most enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution in the first place. However, in one of the most famous moments of his political career, on October 20th, he rose from the President’s seat in the Assembly and made the following, very brief, statement:

“Deputies, I have listened carefully to the arguments made on all sides, and I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Robespierre is correct. A war with Austria at this time would be a most perilous undertaking, whose outcome we cannot possibly determine, and whose consequences for liberty and for France none can foresee. Whilst Mr. Brissot may well be correct in saying that such a war may be inevitable, that does not compel France to begin that war now, of her own volition. A free republic does not go out in search of monsters to slay.”

The Assembly was shocked. The seemingly unstoppable momentum towards war with Austria was halted at once and rapidly turned into reverse. A stunned and sheepish Brissot proposed a new resolution the next day, condemning Austria for its support of King Louis but also underlining the Republic’s peaceful intentions to all nations. It was quickly seconded by none other than Robespierre, who was as surprised as any by the turn of events, and the French Civil War remained, for the time being, merely that.

It could be argued, however, that the greatest impact of Lafayette’s intervention was on Georges Danton. Certainly, he had it in mind when he himself was called to make a fateful choice years later, one that would determine the future of the Republic…

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[1] The "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" is virtually identical to OTL with two big changes: Article I's second sentence now reads "Social distinctions founded in law are hostile to the common good" which basically kills off "active vs passive citizen" forever -- although it also does quite a few other things that are less expected and would take years to play out. There is a brand new Article XVIII: "The principles of the Revolution and this Declaration are of one body, none may suspend one without suspending the other." Basically an anti-Robespierre, anti-Terror Article. Lafayette, of course, personally wrote the entire thing as in OTL.

[2] "Madame Hypocrite" is my invention, but Madame Roland's OTL social conservatism and accusations of hypocrisy thrown her way by the radicals is not.